Douglas Trumbull and Industrial Light and Magic

Trumbull realized in the mid-70s that the budgets were disappearing for the huge, soaring productions he had been enchanted with. Remember, this is a man whose first "major motion picture" was 2001. That's like earning a pilot's license and then flying the space shuttle three weeks later.

After the success of 2001, his dream was to photograph movies using VistaVision, a 70mm format he developed, which not only featured an image twice as large as conventional 35-mm film but ran at 60 frames per second, producing a hyper-realistic viewer experience. Remember, this was all in the 1970s. Though people met with him and expressed interest in his ideas, the deals never came, and Trumbull reverted to working at special effects to pay the bills.

Like most people on 2001, he had a very interesting relationship with Kubrick. Kubrick inserted a card in the credits of 2001 listing himself as the director/creator of the special effects, which was simply not true. "Approved by" would been correct -- the heavy lifting was done first by Wally Gentleman, then Con Pederson, Bruce Logan, Tom Howard, and finally Trumbull, who took over Gentleman's job after Gentleman quit the film. Trumbull and others, stung by Kubrick's highhandedness, had an edgy relationship with Kubrick thereafter.

He had some bad luck in "traditional" Hollywood (the death of Natalie Wood during the filming of "Brainstorm", for instance), and he decided to redirect his career into creating movie-like rides. Until recently his company, Berkshire RideFilm, exited quietly in the Berkshires (he remarked how ironic it was that one of the ships in Silent Running was named Berkshire.)

A brilliant but shy man, Trumbull is by all accounts a loner and ill at ease with crowds, not given to schmoozing, and in a business all about appearence and backslapping he was an odd fit. He wound up being appreciated more as the "SFX" guy he was rather than as the director/visionary he aspired to be.